The Holocaust I Trivia Quiz

Answer: The Final Solution

The Final Solution is, of course, short for the Nazis' own term - the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question" (German - "Endlösung der Judenfrage"). The term "the Holocaust" in this specific sense only gained widespread acceptance c. 1978 onwards after the showing of the TV miniseries of the same title.

Some people object to the term on account of its connotations of "whole burnt sacrifice" and instead call it the "Shoah" (Hebrew for "catastrophe").

Answer: Until July 1941 some Jews in Germany were allowed to emigrate

Hitler's statements in "Mein Kampf" about his plans for the Jews, though inflammatory in the extreme, do not indicate that he had a plan for genocide at that stage.

The 1940 "Madagascar Plan" was so unrealistic as to leave real doubts as to how seriously it was intended.

Until July 1941 Jews were (in principle, at least) allowed to leave Germany provided they had somewhere to go and could actually travel there and were able to pay the fare in advance. They had to pay a high charge for permission to emigrate and after 1935 were allowed to take almost no money with them. Obviously, World War II disrupted international communications badly, but a handful of Jews managed to reach the U.S. and some other safe countries after the outbreak of war in 1939.

Answer: Poland

On the eve of World War II Poland had a Jewish population of about 3.3 million (of whom about 2.9 million were killed in the Holocaust). The Soviet Union, Romania and Hungary also had large Jewish communities, which suffered very heavy losses in the Holocaust.

Answer: Near Lublin (Poland)

The plan for a reservation (sometimes called the Nisko Plan) was very poorly thought out and the 'reservation' was abandoned in April 1940. Able-bodied, skilled workers were sent to camps within the designated area, while many others were simply dumped in open country and told never to show themselves again. Some of the deportations were observed by journalists from neutral countries and the matter was reported in the press in Western Europe and the US at the time.

The next deportations were undertaken on the personal initiative of two Gauleiters, who went beyond the orders that they received. Hitler had ordered that the recently reacquired Alsace and Lorraine be cleared of Jews. On 21 and 22 October 1940 about 6,500 Jews from Baden and the Palatinate were transported to Gurs concentration camp in the south of France. The journey by slow freight trains took about 80 hours, without any food or drink, and many older Jews were dead on arrival.

Answer: Riga

Riga, in Latvia, was turned into a vast killing field for Berlin Jews. At that stage the Nazi regime did not have mass gassing facilities. Soon afterwards, other Jews from North Germany were sent to Maly Trostenets (near Minsk, Belarus), and some were dumped in the already overcrowded Warsaw Ghetto.

Answer: Lodz

The head of the Lodz Jewish Council ("Judenrat"), Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, believed that if he could make the Lodz Ghetto economically useful to the Nazis, a fair number of the inhabitants would stand a chance of surviving. At one stage the Lodz Ghetto had 116 workshops. His rule in Lodz was autocratic and is controversial. However, it was the last ghetto to be completely dissolved. It was liquidated in August 1944, when the remaining Jews in Lodz were sent to Auschwitz.

Answer: June 1941, Kaunas, Lithuania

On the night of 25-26 June 1941 the mobile killing units embarked on a vast killing spree in Kaunas. They were assisted by local Lithuanian volunteers who believed that "the Jews" had had been responsible for the annexation of Lithuania by the Soviet Union in 1940.

Some scholars have suggested this as the beginning of the Holocaust, but there is a growing consensus that there was no single starting date.

Answer: Chelmno (Kulmhof)

Belzec, Treblinka, Sobibor and Auschwitz-Birkenau only became operational as extermination camps from March 1942 onwards. (Some experimental gassings, using mainly Soviet prisoners of war, had taken place earlier in Auschwitz I). Chelmno used enclosed vans with the carbon monoxide exhaust fumes diverted into the van.

It did not have fixed gas chambers. The vans drove directly to mass graves in a forest some way from the town. The whole 'operation' at Chelmno was designed in such a way that there were very few prisoners there at any one time: new arrivals were gassed within about 24 hours.

It was not a 'conventional' concentration camp or extermination camp.

Answer: Bolshevik propaganda?

Early reports were viewed with skepticism in Britain and the US. Germany's reputation as a civilized country, and the fact that in World War I Britain had spread false and implausible stories about German atrocities may have played a part, too. However, it was not till 1944 that the Allies took reports about the scale of the Holocaust entirely seriously, when Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler escaped from Auschwitz and provided much more detailed information than had hitherto been available.

The Soviet Union also had difficulty getting the Western Allies to accept reports about Nazi atrocities on Soviet territory.

Answer: Belzec

Belzec was operational as an extermination camp from March-December 1942. On 11 January 1943 SS-Sturmbannfuehrer Hoefle sent a radio telegramme to Eichmann reporting the total number of Jews killed by the end of 1942. The message was intercepted and decrypted by Bletchley Park but nobody, it seems, was able to make sense of it at the time.

The figure for Belzec is given as 434,508. Since the camp had ceased operating by the end of 1942, this figure is widely regarded as reliable (unless the SS count was erroneous).

In addition, an unknown number of Roma (gypsies) were killed there, but they are not mentioned in the telegramme.

Answer: Their sole purpose was to exterminate

The distinction is often blurred by the use of the term "death camps" for all Nazi camps that had a high death toll. The extermination camps were nearly all located in Poland. There were eight: 1. Part of Auschwitz II (Birkenau); 2. Treblinka II; 3. Belzec; 4. Sobibor; 5. Chelmno; 6. part of Majdanek (which was also an extremely harsh concentration camp). The two others are 7. Maly Trostenets (near Minsk, Belarus) and 8. Bronnaya Gora (near Baranovichi, Belarus). (The role of Majdanek is being re-examined. It seems to have been used more as a 'back-up' killing centre - and as an extremely harsh concentration camp, rather than one of the main routine killing centres).

Moreover, the matter is complicated by the fact that Nazi concentration camps were graded I, II and III for harshness. At the Grade III camps, such as Mauthausen and Auschwitz III (aka Monowitz or Buna), the aim was generally to work the prisoners to death.

To avoid misunderstanding, I would stress that the death toll at all the main Nazi concentration camps was extremely high. In the second half of 1944 many inmates were moved from the Auschwitz complex of camps, in particular, to Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald. These camps became hopelessly overcrowded and typhus claimed tens of thousands of victims. However, there are only two known survivors from Belzec and two from Chelmno. In the case of Maly Trostenets there were no survivors from the main camp but there was about of about twenty Soviet Jews who had been forced to work for the SS on a nearby farm*. Bronnaya Gora had no known survivors at all.

*They were sent to Siberia as 'collaborators' but were released in 1946. Beyond that, there is very little information available. However, there is a monument on the site.

Answer: Elie Wiesel

Elie Wiesel is particularly well known for his autobiographical work "Night", which describes his experiences in the Holocaust. (It is, in fact, the first volume of a trilogy, but the two succeeding volumes, "Dawn" and "Day", are not particularly well known). The Nobel Prize citation described him as "a messenger to mankind".

Answer: Auschwitz-Birkenau

Auschwitz II (Birkenau), as well as being an extermination camp, contained the Women's (Work) Camp. This had a Women's Orchestra (often called the Girls' Orchestra). It was formed on the initiative of the de facto commandant of the Women's Camp, the usually sadistic Maria Mandl (often spelled Mandel). She arranged for the orchestra to be adequately fed and clothed, given better accommodation and provided with adequate heating. In order to allow for rehearsals she arranged for their exemption from all other work; she also turned a blind eye to some breaches of camp rules - and of course provided them with musical instruments. On one level it was one of those grotesqueries of the Holocaust: the women had to play when the long columns of other women marched off to work; they had to play when they returned, and during executions!

Music-loving SS officers, including Mengele, got private concerts and are reported to have said things like, 'You play so movingly'.

Fania Fénélon (professional name, née Goldstein) has written an account of her time as a member of the orchestra. She embodied everything that the Nazis detested: she was a Jew, a Communist sympathizer and she was caught helping the French Resistance. However, her outstanding skills as a singer saved her life.

Answer: He was murdered in April 1945 in Lublin

The Wikipedia article on Feldhendler notes that 'Feldhendler's killing was one of at least 118 violent deaths of Jews in the Lublin district between the summer of 1944 and the fall of 1946 ...'

Answer: no

That said, it is not easy to see what could have been done. The Allies could, perhaps, have tried to bomb the rail network near the major camps, and they could have urged resistance groups to give a high priority to disrupting the transports to the extermination camps. Auschwitz III (Monowitz) was bombed, but only because it was a chemicals factory.

There is only one single known instance of a resistance group stopping a train transporting victims to a camp: during the night of 19-20 April 1943 members of the Belgian resistance stopped a train from Mechelen to Auschwitz and managed to free 17 people, but the train was heavily guarded.

In fairness, one should note the the US government established the War Refugee Board in 1944, with an annual budget of US$1 million. Its mission was rescue, however.

I am of course aware that many other innocent people were also slaughtered by the Nazis on the basis of group identity, stereotyping, conspiracy theories and sheer hatred.